Sweet Reading

In a space in Manhattan that looks very much like an elementary-school classroom, three men and three women, all elderly, sit around a long table and look a little worried. They are awaiting the arrival of a group of children who volunteer for Sweet Readers, an organization that brings middle-school students together with senior citizens who are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

The impending visit is the cause of anxiety. Why are the kids coming? What are they going to talk about? What if they can’t think of anything to say? Kathy Eonnone, the director of the day program these seniors attend, reassures them by reminding them how much they can share from their life experiences and by reminding them of their last meeting with these same students a few days ago. The group is a picture of the charm and the fright that emanate from the very old. They have a simple openness that is rare in fully self-sufficient adults. Mel, a broad-shouldered man with a wide smile, interjects several times to ask what time they will be going home. A woman named Janet, who has the austere features of an octogenarian Tilda Swinton, nods and repeats Eonnone’s observation that kids can learn a lot from being around older people. At the end of the table is a delicate, tiny woman, named Frannie, who stares blankly ahead and says nothing.

When the kids arrive, they bounce in abruptly. They call out “Hi!” and scatter to their assigned counterparts. They hug the old people around their shoulders and drag extra chairs to the table. Their liveliness raises the pitch and pace of the energy in the room. There is a noticeable brightening of the old people’s demeanor; they laugh with a mixture of pleasure and bewilderment. Frannie looks around her with curiosity as she greets the girl who approaches her. Karen Young, the founder and director of Sweet Readers, watches as the kids prepare materials for the project of the day: they will be creating shoebox dioramas depicting places that are special to the seniors.

Young had the idea for starting Sweet Readers in 2009, after her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Young’s daughter, Sophie, would read children’s books to the seniors in her grandmother’s program. The success of the readings sparked the idea to involve other children in these visits. Sophie is here today. She is a brightly assertive and magnetically cheerful thirteen-year-old. Young wasn’t sure at first whether other kids would be able to establish as strong a rapport with seniors as Sophie did. Young’s mother’s social worker, Ella Jolly, suggested that it might be possible to observe Sophie’s interactions and deconstruct them into guidelines for other kids. “I don’t think you can teach empathy,” says Young, “but I do believe that you can educate.” The program that Jolly and Young devised emphasizes understanding of Alzheimer’s and teaches students that they have to take the lead in these interactions and keep in mind their main goal: to discover the person behind the disease.

Since Sweet Readers launched in April, 2011, with eight students from Sophie’s school, the program has ballooned in size and scope. It now has over a hundred student participants (Young expects there to be three hundred and fifty by the end of the year) and chapters in Connecticut, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. The particular tragedy of Alzheimer’s is a loss of self that is often more apparent to others than to the afflicted person. Eonnone mentions that on the recent Sweet Readers outing to MOMA, Janet was embarrassed because several museum employees recognized her from her many years as a regular museumgoer, but she did not recognize any of them.

The kids swiftly fill the shoeboxes with representations of the seniors’ lives—a dog for Mel, who used to walk his German Shepherd in Central Park, a ballet bar for Frannie, who ran her own dance studio. It’s a symbiotic pairing. For the seniors, the chance to talk about their lives helps them regain a sense of identity and dignity, while the realization that nothing is expected of them puts them at ease. The young people, meanwhile, are going through a mirror-image transition as they take their first steps into independence. The Sweet Readers sessions are a rare social laboratory in which adults are dependent on kids, and kids don’t need to be cool; as long as they are kind, nobody minds much if they don’t always get things right.

After an hour, it is time for the old people to go home with their family or caregivers. The kids gather around to discuss the afternoon. A girl named Trinity is particularly excited about how the session went. It was her third time in two weeks meeting with a woman named Liz. “This time,” Trinity says, “she looked up at me after a little while and said, ‘I’ve met you before.’ ”